by Vanessa Able
‘Let’s just go take a look in there,’ I suggested, eyeing up a huge glass-fronted structure with what looked like a giant Buddha’s head surveying its hiply lit interior. The place was called Shiro, and the concept was a pan-Asian restaurant-stroke-terrace-stroke-club, heavily influenced by the Buddha Bar. We walked in to find the manager and staff engaged in a photo session, clustered around a framed certificate of a food award from the Times of India. Eastern ambient music filled the cooled air and stragglers from the late-lunch crowd tweaked morsels of food into their mouths with chopsticks, large shopping bags leaning casually against the table legs.
I looked down at my feet cased in plastic flip-flops: they had acquired a semi-permanent layer of dirt from the sum of all the streets they had passed through since Mumbai, and the once-glossy nail varnish on my toenails had chipped back like a peeling inner-city wall. The bottoms of my trousers were caked in a mysterious mud of whose origin I had no idea, but whose presence I had grown used to as an inevitability of circulating in India; in the discerning light of Shiro, what I’d thought a couple of days ago to be groovy local attire looked more like lame FabIndia dowd. We had fallen down the rabbit hole, which was to say we had crossed the line between the world outside – the cacophony of life that jostled through the day to the soundtrack of jackhammers, caterwauls, car horns and human voices – into the sterilized world of designer labels and meze plates that was the domain of a tiny minority.
I found myself staring at a woman with impeccably tressed hair and a trouser suit that was pressed to match. How did she keep so clean? I looked to Thor, who appeared to be experiencing the same level of disorientation. His annual visits to the ashram in Chennai were pretty much the extent of his experience in the country. He had never felt the urge – or he simply hadn’t had the time – to travel around, and had certainly never come across places like UB City. For Thor, India was where street vendors provided thimbles of chai and fresh coconut for only a few pennies, and where one ate rice and dal daily at the ashram canteen. Everything else was excess. The idea that I was on the verge of ordering a cocktail that would cost him several days’ living budget was visibly vexing him. I took pity.
‘Subway?’
‘Oh yes, yes. Let’s get a sandwich. Thank god.’
Indeed, Subway was a welcome sanctuary of mass consumerism (albeit still quite high end by relative standards) in the bizarre realm of exclusivity we had discovered. From the discomfort of the fast-food seating there, we gained space for reflection, trying to find a speck of meaning where really there wasn’t any. UB City didn’t reveal anything too interesting beyond the fact that there was obviously a significant number of people with the cash to blow on keeping Salvatore Ferragamo and his haute-couture colleagues in business. For sure, the number of super-rich in India has gone up in tune with the economy in general since the early 1990s, but they still only count for about 1% of the population. Leagues more interesting is the new economic bubble towards whom the Nano was ostensibly aimed – the emerging middle class. They were the new generation of consumers carving out their own niches in the gaping territory between UB City and the slums, and it was their backs on which the hopes of the new Indian dream were pinned.
That night, we followed up our Subway subs with veg fried rice in the company of an IBM software engineer called Arunsai, whom Thor had met on the train. Thor showed me the piece of paper with his phone number, shaky from the seismographic effects of the railroad, and I insisted we call him straight away – I was eager to hear at first hand about the life of an IT worker here at Ground Zero. After the disorienting extremes of UB City, I wanted to discover more about the people in the middle.
Arunsai suggested we meet in a Chinese restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of town, an air-conditioned family joint with little embellishment other than the odd hint of Chineseness in the form of a lucky cat or a goldfish. Arunsai ordered chicken fried rice and launched straight into bemoaning the fact he might soon need to forgo his meat-eating ways. He was about to be engaged, he explained, to a girl from Chennai, and she was a vegetarian. Her family were intractable on the issue that she was to remain so, and that she would never have to cook meat for her husband. Arunsai looked downcast.
‘I don’t know how I can never eat meat again,’ he sighed, before remembering something else that made him reach for his phone with a sly grin. ‘You want to see her picture?’ He pulled up a muggy, pixelated image of a young, plumpish girl dressed in a sari and adorned with all manner of golden trinkets, hanging from any part of her head that would support it.
‘Our engagement is next month and the wedding is in May,’ he beamed. ‘You must come.’
I had yet to get used to the Indian tradition of inviting any random stranger to a wedding, and was thrown a bit off kilter by his good-natured proposal.
‘She seems nice. What’s she like?’
‘I don’t know; we haven’t really spoken yet. But I think she will be a good wife.’ He forgot to add, if only she could whip me up a weekly roast lamb, though it was written all over his face.
Arunsai had come to Bangalore from his home in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu in 2005 to claim his own stake in the IT gold rush. At first, it had been hard to find his feet: after many weeks of applying for jobs and sifting through rejections, he was offered an internship at Compuserve, though he had to pay the company for the privilege. He subsisted on the meagre Rs 5,000 (£60) his father was able to send him each month. Clearly a savvy worker, Arunsai managed to scale up the chain in a snakes-and-ladders motion that saw him transferring to Pune for a while to work for IBM, before being duped into travelling to the US in search of work that never materialized.
‘I dreamed of America and a Honda Civic,’ he confided with a self-deprecating grin. ‘Everyone in India does.’ But that dream didn’t come true and after a few months of fruitless job hunting, he returned home.
After dinner, Arunsai insisted we go to visit his home. It was about a five-minute drive from the restaurant, in a brand new apartment building with its own parking garage where, having driven ahead of us on his motorbike, he showed us proudly to his very own parking spot. His flat was sizeable, with three bedrooms, two balconies and a security system, but not a scrap of furniture. His bed was a mat on the tiled floor and his kitchen was a single gas cylinder with a pot perched on top. He was clearly a man in need of a woman, and living in anticipation of his impending wedding and the gifts that would follow and furnish his house. In the meantime, as far as he was concerned, he’d done the right thing by his future wife by finding them their first family home, and that was all that mattered.
Driving back to the city centre that evening, I became aware again of Abhilasha’s errant steering, which I was sure had grown worse since I’d first noticed it on the way to Bangalore a few days earlier. It called for immediate action; she had to go to a mechanic. A quick Google search informed me that a nearby Tata garage by the name of Prerana Motors was at my service, and I called them to make an outpatient appointment for Abhilasha the next day. That night Thor had the opportunity to see me at my obsessive-compulsive worst as I went online to ensure I was as informed as I could be prior to handing her over to any potentially unscrupulous mechanics.
My online research had done little to shed light on her disorder, which I learned was referred to in the trade as a ‘steering pull’. Ploughing through a cascade of search results, I was forced to battle with an impenetrable mechanic’s lexicon of the various causes of a crooked steering wheel. An authoritative-looking website called aa1car.com (‘Automotive Diagnostic and Repair Help for Cars and Trucks’, if you’re interested) listed no fewer than 31 possibilities for why Abhilasha was out of joint, from binding in the upper strut mounts to an uneven parallelogram steering linkage. The page continued with dense passages written in small fonts that showed no consideration for the notion that there might be anyone other than a doctor of auto-mechanics reading the text.
‘Too much cross-camber can make a
vehicle pull or lead towards the side that has the most (positive) camber or away from the side that has the least (negative) camber; the underlying cause may be a bent strut or mislocated strut tower, a bent spindle, collapsed control arm bushing, weak or broken spring, or a shifted cross member or engine cradle.’
This was not going to be a straightforward deal, not now that spindles, strut towers and arm bushings were involved. I needed to go to the best garage in town in a bid to stem the tide of the what-ifs that had started flooding the flittery membranes of my subconscious. What if we had to wait for spare parts? And what if those spare parts could only be sourced from a mine in the deepest Himalayas? And what if they could only travel here on the backs of lame mules? In my pessimistic mind’s eye, the future didn’t look too bright.
Still, lady luck hadn’t entirely jumped ship: we were after all in Bangalore, home to some of the best cerebral matter the subcontinent had to offer. What better place than this city full of geeks and engineers to search for a cure to Abhilasha’s condition?
The photographs on Prerana Motors’ website spoke of an impressively large workshop filled with state-of-the-art machinery, lots of colourful balloons and a very shiny floor. It was an image that bore little resemblance to its real, rather more makeshift appearance. The actual entrance was a sign painted onto the brick wall of an enclosure off a dusty back road. As Thor and I stood looking confused in the parking lot, we were approached by a man in a pressed white shirt whose eyes lit up at the sight of Abhilasha.
He walked straight to Thor. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Yes, actually you can,’ I cut in. Irritatingly enough, my hard-learned engineer lingo jumped out of the window before you could say mislocated strut. ‘It seems that the steering wheel is a bit, erm, wonky.’
‘The problem is your Nano has a wonky wheel?’ the man asked with genuine concern, still looking directly at Thor. I nodded. He gave the tyres a sage once-over before adjusting his glasses and straightening back up to face Thor. ‘Please, give me the key and I will take it for a test drive.’
Thor turned to me and I hesitated. The man insisted with an almost impatient gesture of his hand.
‘Please, wait in the visitors’ room, backside,’ he said, pointing towards the building behind the wall. Against my better judgement and every screaming maternal instinct, I gave the man my keys. He and Abhilasha disappeared in a white cloud out onto the Old Madras Road.
Thor sensed my concern. ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Come on, let’s go check out the visitors’ room backside.’
The visitors’ room was a hot and poky little space with nothing in the way of shiny floors or balloons. Instead there were a few plastic chairs, a copy of the previous day’s Deccan Herald, another paper in the local Kannada script (which looked like an alphabet constructed during a particularly creative night spent with a couple of joints and a baroque love-heart stencil) and a water cooler proffering about an inch of liquid and two suspiciously recycled-looking plastic cups. We waited for half an hour with no news and began to wonder whether our white-shirted friend hadn’t already reached Madras by way of its namesake road. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went outside. There was Abhilasha, surrounded by a formidable pit-stop crew who were washing and polishing her bodywork with urgency, commanded by the man in the white shirt standing in their midst and conducting the service symphony in a hoedown of waved gestures.
I approached him apprehensively with the air of someone meeting a surgeon who’d just performed a triple bypass on their next of kin. So, was everything all right?
‘Yes, yes, everything is done,’ he beamed.
‘You, uh, fixed the steering?’ I asked, incredulous that there appeared to be no need for any inpatient treatment, nor for new binding for the upper strut mounts to be ordered from up north.
The steering, I was assured, was fixed, and he had personally checked over the whole car himself. Oil and water had been topped up and now Abhilasha was getting a good clean on the inside and out.
It was all too easy…
‘Well, I’ll just go over and pay while you finish off here then,’ I said, stepping towards the garage office, mentally totting up the price of the list of jobs he had reeled off, but white-shirted man stopped me in my tracks.
‘No, madam, please, no money!’
‘No money?’ What was this, a TV show set-up?
‘No, free service, madam.’
‘What? Why?’ Surely this was a ruse. I didn’t really believe him until he handed me Abhilasha’s keys ten minutes later, my little yellow companion gleaming like the Koh-i-Noor diamond. The man didn’t stick around for a palm of baksheesh or even a mild show of gratitude; he simply turned on his heel and marched back towards the garage.
‘Thank you,’ I called out after him, a bit choked. He looked around, surprised, so I tried to think of a good follow-up.
‘I’m very, very… satisfied.’
The man smiled and continued walking. I sat down in the newly vacuumed driver’s seat to find the steering wheel perfectly aligned and the floor covered with large pieces of brown paper that wished us ‘Happy Motoring’.
7
PEDAL TO THE METAL – The Hills of the Nilgiris
MYSORE to FORT KOCHI; KM 1,709–2,105
The drive south began in the regal city of Mysore, a place we opted to overlook entirely in the name of clocking up some decent kilometres after a week’s hiatus in Bangalore. This was in spite of the Lonely Planet’s claim that it was ‘one Indian city that deserves a slower pace’. The pace Thor and I opted for resulted in a total of twelve hours in its vicinity: seven asleep, two eating, one cursing the hotel’s slow internet, and a further two hours stuck in traffic on the way in and out. A cheeky ten-minute peek at the Maharaja’s floodlit palace through the crack in its closed gates before dinner was the closest we got to any appreciation of the architecture there, a fleeting encounter that was a symptom of my diminishing urge for cultural edification in the face of the growing compulsion just to keep on driving.
It was while we were leaving Mysore for Fort Kochi, the old colonial fishing port on Kerala’s coast, that Thor finally dropped the question that gave air to a Pandora’s box of worms.
‘Would you like me to drive at all?’
The tone of his voice betrayed the prospect that getting behind the wheel of the Nano was about the last thing he had any desire to do. But perhaps he felt compelled, after a week of having me taxi him around Bangalore, to offer to pitch in with the driving. For my part, I had absolutely no intention of even offering Thor the wheel. The primary reason was that despite the emotional-physical gumption his presence was inspiring in me, I was still harbouring traces of guilt in view of the fact that I had originally intended to make this journey alone. Taking a lover had been an unforeseen development and infringed a little on my single-girl-hero self-image. To compensate, I decided that at least I would ensure that I planned and drove the entire route. Up to now, this had seemed a situation that suited Thor well, since he hadn’t exhibited any special flair for map reading, nor a vocalized preference for any particular style of driving.
‘I was hoping to drive the whole route myself,’ I said. ‘It’s important to me. Like a sort of a challenge, you know.’
Thor brightened. He was visibly relieved as he lowered the backrest of the passenger seat.
‘Great. You be the boss, then.’
And so I was, at least as far as the roads were concerned. I was route planner, executor and chauffeur all in one, and occasionally it went to my head, in as far as I found myself commanding my companion to double-check a particular road or run out to ask directions from a savvy-looking passer-by. Still, my bossiness seemed to roll off his back: Thor was my happy partner who controlled the music, passed me the water, fed cookies into my mouth as I drove and lowered the window from time to time to stick his head out to smoke.
After Mysore, our route towards the coastal town of Kochi followed the NH212
down to the national parks of Bandipur and Mudumalai that mark the intersection of the three big southern states, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and form part of a much larger highland area called the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. Thor and I were particularly excited by the website’s inventory of fauna that suggested a safari might be on the cards: tigers, leopards, elephants, pythons and hyenas all inhabited these parklands in the company of more fantastical-sounding animals like four-horned antelopes, giant flying squirrels and mugger crocodiles.
As our path through Bandipur progressed along a road that wound through dense, leafy scrub, however, I had the sinking sensation that the closest we would get to any of the aforementioned beasts would be through the pictures of tigers and elephants that hung from the trees and carried sombre warnings not to disturb the wild animals or make any sudden noises to alarm them. Within seconds of spotting the first such sign, we were overtaken by a rickshaw parping his horn with gusto. Another passed us a few minutes later with similar pomp, as did another, then another. Deeply peeved by the prospect of their horns scaring off potential wildlife, I secretly supplicated the tigers and elephants to take traffic matters into their own hands, if they found the sound of the horns half as irritating as I did.
By the time we passed through Bandipur and crossed into Mudumalai, we spotted a couple of wild elephants between the branches of roadside bushes. Thor bade me pull an emergency stop and he jumped out with a camera to get a closer look at one that was bathing in the stream below. It was a spectacular sight, and strangely intimate. As soon as he sensed our presence, however, the elephant turned to the opposite bank and made up its steep slope with a sprightliness I had never before witnessed in an animal larger than a Labrador. It seemed we had made some kind of incursion on his modesty.
The tigers, leopards and giant flying squirrels were nowhere to be seen, but one group of animals we couldn’t avoid were the langur monkeys who roamed in tribes and hung out menacingly by the side of the road as though daring us to slow down enough to warrant nicking a wiper. As we drove by one particularly large group of the animals, Thor had me stop the car again. He tore the side of the packet of digestive biscuits we’d been eating and emptied the remaining few into my hands.
